My first love wasn’t poetry but computers. My first substantial work was not a poem, fable or story, but a piece of software written on the Apple IIe. Presently, my primary OS is Ubuntu and I keep partitions free just so I can ‘distro hop’. The term, if you’re not familiar with it, means trying out one distrobution of Linux or BSD (or any operating system) only to remove it as soon as you’ve got it working. Every so often, I use Windows. Windows is like a dependable pony. For the most part, you can trust Windows to keep a steady pace, but that gets dull after a while. I yearn for the unpredictable stallion, the temperamental, wild and maybe ungrateful horse that would just as soon kick you out of the barn; but that’s the horse that runs like lightning.

The beauty of Linux, if you’re not familiar with it, is the vast and varied community developing both the operating system and the software that runs on it. There are hundreds, perhaps over a thousand, different Linux distributions. At the core of every Linux distro is the Linux Kernel. The Linux kernel could be compared to an engine. That one engine is the same in every car, but every car that’s built around it is different, specialized and custom. Many countries produce their own distro. At present, I’m writing this on a distribution called Ubuntu – probably the best known distribution. Sometimes I use Fuduntu. The Turkish government is putting funds behind a beautiful linux distro called Pardus (which I’ve also installed). The Chinese have been developing Red Flag Linux. From Spain you can get Triquel. Each has its own peculiarities, advantages and even disadvantages. What’s incredible though, is that all of these distributions are free and they are developed by a community of programmers who might or might not receive remuneration for their work. They do what they do because they believe in the free and, most importantly, creative sphere entailed by the free exchange of ideas.

To me, there is a striking similarity between great poetry and great programming. They’re both a kind of literature. Great poetry and coding are both jaw-droppingly elegant. A great programmer can do, in just a few lines, what takes the uninspired programmer a thousand lines. Great programming is an art form. When you see it, the first thing you ask yourself is this: Why didn’t I think of that? Just four lines of code can match and outperform 200. When we read a great passage from Shakespeare or Keats, the effect can be the same. They can make the poetry look effortless and inevitable. The same could be said for music. Johann Sebastian Bach, my favorite composer, (in another time and place) would have been a programmer of unrivaled genius. He sets forth his musical ideas with precision and develops them with such a sense of simple inevitability that one could be forgiven for thinking that his music wrote itself. Bach was God’s sewing machine and his cloth was sound.

What’s so unique about the Linux ecology (and without getting too specific) is the licensing under which the software is circulated. The license requires that anyone can look at the source code. In other words, any programmer is entitled to look at the work of another programmer and, hopefully, tweak and improve the previous programmer’s work. This is a supreme advantage when security issues arise. The openness of the architecture means that anyone — the little kid with a great idea to the computer scientist at CERN — can patch a problem. By way of comparison, all Microsoft software is closed source. This means that no one — not the curious child, not you, not me, not the computer scientist — can look at Microsoft’s code. If we tried, we would risk legal reprisals. Such is the case with the brilliant young man, George Hotz, who is presently being sued by Sony. When Sony initially sold their PS3, it was advertised as being Linux capable. This opened a wide world of exploration for kids, teenagers, and even the defense department. Why was the United States government interested in Sony’s PS3? Because it could run Linux. When the natural genius of curious youths opened a pandora’s box of problems for Sony, the corporation forced them and everyone who had already bought the units to disable the Linux functionality of their PS3s. In the meantime, Sony is seeking to brand George Hotz (and the other youths associated with him) as criminals.

The dispute is between the free exchange of ideas, exploration and innovation on the one hand, and a closed, litigious and insular development model on the other. Businesses, justifiably, need to protect their intellectual property. To do so, they’re increasingly using the software patent as a means to assert property rights not just over actual programming but ideas and concepts. (See also here.)

Now, you may be asking yourself, why is a poet talking about software patents on a web site dedicated to poetry? Consider the New York Times article by Scott Turow, Paul Aiken and James Shapiro: Would the Bard Have Survived the Web? You would think, with that kind of firepower, that the authors, one of them teaching Shakespeare at the University level, would have written a more persuasive editorial.

But their editorial doesn’t do justice to the phrase cherry picking. They didn’t just cherry pick, they killed the tree. They draw an analogy between copyright law and a certain kind of Elizabethan “paywall”:

“cultural paywalls” were abundant in London: workers holding moneyboxes (bearing the distinctive knobs found by the archaeologists) stood at the entrances of a growing number of outdoor playhouses, collecting a penny for admission.

Their use of the phrase “cultural paywall” is loaded. They seem to want to imply, without doing the work to support the contention, that the culture (and by that I assume they mean the great poetry and drama that we inherited from the Elizabethans) was only possible because playgoers were forced to pay for content. The analogy, as far as it goes, asserts that the web is a kind of modern day playhouse that lacks a “cultural paywall”. Therefore, no modern day Shakespeare could possibly make a living or “survive the web”. Fair enough, but their argument is embarrassingly simplistic and glosses over a far more complex relationship among the poets themselves.

For instance, while they credit the very existence of Hamlet to the “cultural paywall”, they completely ignore or are collectively ignorant of the fact that Hamlet was probably a derivative work based on a play by Thomas Kyd. If the copyright laws had been enforced then, as they are today, Kyd would have sued Shakespeare for every nickel he was worth. Hamlet wouldn’t have been possible. In fact, Shakespeare had the reputation, rightly or wrongly, (and early in his career) for being a hack and a plagiarist.

Money changed everything. Almost overnight, a wave of brilliant dramatists emerged, including Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. These talents and many comparable and lesser lights had found the opportunity, the conditions and the money to pursue their craft.

Yes it did. And if the Elizabethans had anything like our modern laws, money would have kept changing everything. Here’s what Robert Greene, a slightly older playwright, had to say about the young Shakespeare:

‘Base-minded men all three of you, if by my miserie you be not warnd: for unto none of you (like mee) sought those burres to cleave: those Puppets (I meane) that spake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange, that I, to whom they all have beene beholding: is it not like that you, to whom they all have been beholding, shall (were yee in that case as I am now) bee both at once of them forsaken? Yes trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tyger’s hart wrapped in a Player’s hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey. O that I might entreate your rare wits to be employed in more profitable courses: & let these Apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions.’

Now, this is nothing if not a searing accusation of plagiarism. He refers to Shakespeare as nothing more than an actor, diminishing his role as an author, by calling him a Puppet who does nothing more than use

Robert Greene

the Anticks, the words and phrases, of the authors who have come before — “garnisht in our colours”. In a sense, the actor is the consummate plagiarist. That’s his job. He mouths the words of the author, but don’t confuse the actor with the author, says Greene.

Greene then goes on to prick his target with the point of his quill. There is an upstart Crow, he says, beautified with our feathers. Still don’t know who Greene is talking about? He drops a hint. He is a “Tyger’s hart wrapped in a Player’s hyde”. This is a sly phrase mocking a line from Shakespeare’s early play Henry VI, part 3: “Oh, tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide.” Evidently, the play and the phrase were well enough known that Greene assumed most literate persons (or playgoers) would recognize Shakespeare as the target. However, Greene’s not taking any chances. He next calls Shakespeare a Iohannes fac totum, a Jack-of-all-trades, who considers himself the only “Shake-scene” in the country. Greene all but removes any doubt as to the target of his barbs.

If only Greene and Kyd had had a modern patent or copyright lawyer. Turow, Aiken and Shapiro can rest assured that, yes, money would have changed everything. Were Kyd and Greene the only playwrights who considered Shakespeare a plagiarist? Probably not. If Sidney hadn’t been killed, he probably would have wondered at the many echoes of his own sonnets in Shakespeare’s sonnets. It’s not unreasonable to wonder whether Shakespeare would have survived our modern legal system, let alone the web. The web would have been the least of it.

But there are more problems with Turow, Aiken and Shapiro’s cherry picking.Their argument dies an ugly death when they write that Elizabethan theater’s end,

came in the mid-17th century, at the outset of a bloody civil war, when authorities ordered the walls pulled down. The regime wasn’t motivated by ideals of open access or illusions of speeding progress. They simply wanted to silence the dramatists, who expressed a wide range of unsettling thoughts to paying audiences within.

I hope the irony of this final paragraph isn’t lost on advocates of free and open exchange. Turow, Aiken, and Shapiro, themselves state that the theaters were closed because the “regime” wasn’t motivated by ideals of “open access or illusions of speeding progress”. Nothing so describes the current attitude of corporations like SONY, Apple or Microsoft. They have no interest in “ideals of open access or illusions of speeding progress”, unless it serves their bottom line. (The censors during the time of Shakespeare, likewise, had little interest in permitting plays that didn’t serve their bottom line: power.) When open access competitively threatens the bottom line of modern corporations, they have shown a willingness to use and abuse current copyright and patent law to criminalize whoever is cramping their wallet.

How does this relate to poetry and literature?

Poets, like composers, borrow from each other. Händel’s organ concertos shamelessly borrow whole lines of music from Telemann’s Tafelmusik (Händel liked and admired Telemann). Mozart shamelessly plagiarized an entire opening melody from JC Bach in one of his piano sonatas — a melody from one of Bach’s piano concertos (Mozart befriended JC Bach while a child). Not only that, but Mozart’s first four piano concertos were all orchestrations of piano

JS Bach by Pascal Moehlmann

sonatas by other composers. Bach rewrote Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater as Psalm 51. The Elizabethan poets and dramatists were constantly borrowing lines and ideas from each other. Shakespeare, Dekker, Middleton, Jonson, all of them stole whole passages and ideas from translators and historians like Holinshed and Thomas North. They stole whole scenes from the Spanish poet, novelist and playwright Miguel de Cervantes. The lost play “Cardenio”, thought to be a collaboration between John Fletcher and Shakespeare, was just such a play. Cervantes died in 1616, the same year as Shakespeare. If Cervantes had had a modern copyright lawyer, and had been aware of all the borrowing, he could have died a litigiously happy man.

What if all this went on today? It does. The performer Vanilla Ice was hit hard by Queen and David Bowie for borrowing something as slight as a base line. Such borrowing is embarrassingly trivial compared to previous eras. Try Googling the words Beatles and plagiarism. Every time a composer wrote a set of variations, and made some money from it, they were infringing another composer’s intellectual property. Beethoven wrote dozens and dozens of variations for quick profit and recognition and almost all of them (but for those based on his own melodies) would presently be considered “infringements”.

The real title of Turow, Aiken and Shapiro’s article should have been: Would the Bard Have Survived the Copyright? 9 out of 10 Shakespeare plays probably would not exist, including Hamlet, the play which the authors hold forth with trembling quill.

Yes, writers and authors need to protect their intellectual property, but there’s more to it. There needs to be a balance. I have put all of my poetry, this editorial, and other writings on the web. I have gotten no money in return. Nothing. On the other hand, if it weren’t for the web, nobody would be able to read my poetry or writing. Though I have sent my poetry to dozens of publishers, my poetry has never been published or accepted by an editor. If it weren’t for the web then the body of work represented by this blog would be unavailable to you. None of my poetry or blog posts would be accessible.

Would I like to earn some money from my effort? Yes.

But the ability to reach a world wide audience, even without remuneration, is also worth something. The fact that I can put my poetry and articles on the web means that other artists will be exposed to it. Maybe it will influence them? What if an artist or another poet borrowed from my writing?

Good.

But there’s another side to the coin.

While I want other artists to borrow and be inspired by what I write, there are limits. Some artists and writers issue their works under a Creative Commons License. While I like the principles underlying their licenses, they go too far for a writer like myself. They allow not just the creative reuse of an artist’s work, but allow the wholesale copying and redistribution of that work. Creative Commons claims that their licenses “maximize digital creativity, sharing, and innovation”, but I would dispute that.

If Turow, Aiken, and Shapiro have an argument, it’s that artists like myself ought to be entitled to something. I agree. But where is the balance? I would like Creative Commons to develop a license that would truly encourage creativity and innovation, not just wholesale copying. There’s a difference and the current Creative Commons licenses fail to recognize it, either by choice or because such refinement is beyond the scope of their licenses. That’s too bad. I wish there were a truly creative copyright available to artists like myself.

And that brings me back to Linux, the open source community and software patent law. Programmers are creating their own literature. However, the current software patent law (like copyright law in the arts), threatens to drastically undermine, if not destroy, the spirit of digital creativity, sharing and innovation that created modern computing. If it hadn’t been for Compaq’s reverse engineering of the IBM PC, the course of history would be far different. Ironically, there probably wouldn’t be a Microsoft. Microsoft exists because Compaq dared to reproduce IBM’s BIOS. Their breakthrough allowed any number of business to create PC clones and vastly expanded the market for Microsoft software. Innovation exploded. The burst of creativity is comparable to the burst of poetry and drama during the Elizabethan era.

The doors to the playhouse were a kind of paywall and they were a tremendous boon but they weren’t, in and of themselves, the source and reason for the incredible flowering of literature. Poets and dramatists, though they may have sometimes resented the borrowing, were free to draw from each others work. The genius of the age was made possible by a relatively free and unrestricted exchange of ideas. Marlowe didn’t patent Iambic Pentameter, his “mighty line”. Sidney, Daniel and Spenser didn’t copyright or patent the sonnet.

If IBM had successfully enforced a patent on their BIOS, nothing would be the same.

Companies like Microsoft, Oracle, SONY and Apple, all in the forefront of software patent abuse, are precisely (and ironically) the companies who benefited the most from the comparative absence of aggressive and abusive patent enforcement. It should come as no surprise that they are now vigorously (and hypocritically) using patent law to suppress the very opportunities that allowed them to topple IBM. They are our modern IBMs.

Writing software for computers is a creative art. The software that you use everyday is a precise kind of poetry and the computer is its unforgiving audience. I learned to write poetry, in part, by writing for my Apple IIe. I learned to use words efficiently, how to formulate an idea and how to elegantly structure those ideas. The FOSS community, the community from which nearly all Linux and BSD distributions arise, is one where curious children and computer scientists are free to engage their creative talents. To paraphrase Turow, Aiken and Shapiro, they needn’t fear that the “authorities” will order “the walls pulled down”; but the abusive use of patent law threatens to change all that. No individual in the FOSS community has the wherewithal to fight a corporation’s patent lawsuit; and with the alarming proliferation of trivial and over-broad patents, the odds of unintentional infringement increase exponentially. Patent abuse could strangle the FOSS community. They know that corporations aren’t “motivated by ideals of open access or illusions of speeding progress.” They know that, in many cases, for profit businesses would simply prefer to silence their competition, good and bad, worried by “a wide range of unsettling” innovations.

Would a modern Shakespeare survive in our current legal climate? I doubt it.

Though there are limits to such parallels, the current world of art, music and literature has lost much because of overly litigious and legalistic copyright enforcement. A movie like Sita Sings the Blues is breaking copyright law. If Nina Paley, the creator of Sita, had strictly followed the dictates of copyright law she could not have afforded to create her movie. And that would be a tremendous loss to our culture. Correction: Nina Paley writes:

Sita Sings the Blues is in complete compliance with copyright regulations. I was forced to pay $50,000 in license fees and another $20,000 in legal costs to make it so. That is why I am in debt. My compliance with copyright law is by no means an endorsement of it. Being $70,000 in the hole reminds me daily what an ass the law is. The film is legal, and that legality gives me a higher moral ground to stamp my feet upon as I denounce the failure that is copyright.

Check here for the full explanation. You can be fairly certain that Shakespeare, were he alive today, would suffer much the same fate despite the posturing of Turow, Aiken and Shapiro. How many works of art have not been produced because of these very constraints?

In a similar vein, a balance needs to struck as regards software patent law. Behemoths like Apple, SONY and Microsoft are increasingly using and threatening to use patent law as a bludgeon. They greatly threaten the free exchange of ideas, innovation and creativity. Bad patents can be trivial. They can be “an idea” rather than an actual piece of code. This means that even if a company hasn’t written software, they can sue a programmer who has, simply because the programmer’s idea was similar.

By analogy, the equivalent would be if a poet patented a rhyme like red and bed.

Any other poet to use this rhyme would be violating intellectual property. Yes, software patents, apparently, really can be that trivial. If IBM had pursued the idea of the BIOS under patent law, COMPAQ could not have reverse engineered the IBM PC.

If I have an argument to make it’s that there is little difference between creating software and the creation of poetry, novels, plays or music. A balance needs to be struck. Software is its own literature. There should be some degree of protection but also an allowance for creativity and innovation. A patent or copyright, as Turow, Aiken and Shapiro would have it, can be thought of as a paywall, but abuse can turn these paywalls into the very opposite of a “cultural paywall”. They can easily stifle and kill a culture’s creative impulse. It’s this fact which the authors overlook, either deliberately or through ignorance when they vastly oversimplify Shakespeare and the abrupt closure of England’s 17th century playhouses.

I’m a believer in the free exchange of ideas for the purposes of art, creativity and true innovation.

Nearly all of my poetry is here, published on the web and free.

All my articles are free.

Greene, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson and Middleton all thrived because there was a balance, if at times uncomfortable, between what was considered private and public. While they might have resented some forms of plagiarism and the unauthorized distribution of their plays, they also benefited from the same. If there was one place where Shakespeare would currently survive, it would be the one place most like the free-for-all that characterized the Elizabethan notion of intellectual property: The Web.

April 30 2011: I posted one further and third update: Double Falsehood Revisited. See this for my final thoughts and why I’ve come round to Hammond’s opinion.

“Double Falsehood”, said to be the remnants of a long lost collaboration between Fletcher & Shakespeare, is in the news again.

Arden's New Edition

The different write-ups, including by the New York Times, give the impression that this is a recent discovery, but it’s not. Double Falsehood has been considered and reconsidered again, again and again. The latest academic to throw his eggs into the Double Falsehood basket is Brean Hammond of Nottingham University. None of the articles go into any detail and many of them quote the same statement from Hammond:

In a statement, Mr. Hammond said “the early consensus” on “Double Falsehood” was “that Theobald had either forged it or passed it off as written by Shakespeare,” but more recently “a gradual trickle of belief” has “developed into an irresistible flood.”

It’s probably a flood of evidence eerily similar to another flood of circumstantial evidence that surrounded The Funeral Elegy. Donald Foster was the academic who claimed The Funeral Elegy as Shakespeare’s. Just like Arden, the publishers of the Norton Shakespeare decided to include the Funeral Elegy in their complete edition (fully annotated). Since then, Foster has slunk off to ignominy while his various fair-weather friends have been sadly afflicted with amnesia. Norton has quietly removed the Funeral Elegy. Expect the Arden editors to do the same with Double Falsehood.

By the way, way back when the Funeral Elegy was first claimed for Shakespeare, I might have been the very first to identify John Ford as the writer. Yes. Me. Somewhere, buried in Shaksper (I think), is proof. But that’s been a along time ago and my ambition has never been to be a Shakespeare scholar. I was kicked off Shaksper. Why? Because of my sense of humor. I enjoy the granular linguistic and stylistic analyses that prove and disprove authorship and that makes me a good counterfeiter. Back when I was still an upstanding member of Shaksper, I typed in a play called Dr. Dodypoll. No one had a copy of it (and it’s hard to find) but I found it at an obscure Boston library. There was much speculation that Shakespeare had had a hand in writing it (discovering new works of Shakespeare is a past-time for many in the field).

While typing it in, I guessed that the real author was likely Robert Greene (who famously insulted Shakespeare as a plagiarist) or George Peele (I can’t remember now). I remember that the image clusters, if nothing else, were a dead giveaway. But I thought I’d have some fun, so I forged some Shakespeare. Can you find it? Here it is, for the first time in 15 or 20 years:

Leander. My Lord, he fears that you will be angry with him.
Alphonso. You play the villain: wherefore should he fear?
I only proved her virtues for his sake,
And now you talk of anger. Aye me wretch,
That ever I should live to be thus shamed!

Alberdure. Madame, I swear the Lady is my love;
Therefore your highness cannot charge my father
With any wrong to your high worth of her.
Constantine. Sister, you see we utterly mistake
The kind and princely dealing of the Duke:
Therefore without more ceremonious doubts
Lets reconfirm the contract and his love.

Katherine. I warrant you my Lord – the Duke – dissembles.
It is not love doth speak, for such strong terms
Hath ever love. Dear Sister, do but note
The fruit tree giveth not that is not pruned
For nature teacheth us th’extravagance
Of outward show doth sap the inward stock
In substance and of worth. It is love
That like the gentle drop of rain speaks not
Its name unto the earth yet calls from forth
The ground the weary seed. (Nor yet the voice
Of angels can amaze the knotted bud
As doth a single drop of rain from heaven.)
And so true love should do, for that speaks not
That does in deeds what words may never do.

Alphonso. Here on my knees, at the alter of those feet,
I offer up in pure and sacred breath
The true speech of my heart and heart itself.
Require no more if thou be princely born.
And not of rocks or ruthless tigers bred.

Katherine. My Lord, I kindly cry you mercy now,
Ashamed that you should injure your estate
To kneel to me; and vow before these Lords
To make you all amends you can desire.

Flores. Madame, in admiration of your grace
And princely wisdom, and to gratify
The long wished joy done to my Lord the Duke,
I here present your highness with this cup,
Wrought admirably by th’art of spirits,
Of substance fair, more rich than earthly gems,
Whose value no man’s judgment can esteem.

Alphonso. Flores, I’ll interrupt the Duchess thanks
And for the present thou hast given to her
To strengthen her consent to my desires,
I recompense thee with a free release
Of all offenses twixt thyself and me.

Flores. I humbly thank your excellence.
Katherine. But where is now unkind Earl Lassinbergh,
That injures his fair love and makes her wear
This worthless garland? Come, Sir, make amends,
Or we will here award you worthy penance.

Lassinbergh. Madame, since her departure I have done
More hearty penance than heart could wish,
And vow hereafter to live ever hers.

Sure enough, there were other academics on the mailing list who spotted the passage right away – only they thought it was by Shakespeare. The excitement was palpable. Because I wasn’t trying to embarrass anyone (I was just having fun) I told everyone about my forgery within the day – unprompted. They were not amused and I was blackballed. End of story.

The point is not that they were dupes (they had no reason to suspect a practical joke and I didn’t give them much time to consider) but that Shakespeare can be faked and that we’re all guilty of seeing what we want to see. The right Shakespearean scholar would have quickly recognized my little passage as a forgery – if only because the grammar is anachronistic. And who are the right Shakespearean scholars? First and foremost is Brian Vickers, author of ‘Counterfeiting’ Shakespeare. He was among the first scholars who persuasively identified John Ford as the author of the Funeral Elegy. If Brian Vickers comes out in favor of Double Falsehood, then that is the time to sit up and take notice. However, I expect that Vickers is sharpening his pencil to a scalpel’s edge (as I write). Expect blood. Other scholars to look for: MM Mahood, author of Shakespeare’s Wordplay, Edward A. Armstrong, author of Shakespeare’s Imagination, and Marina Tarlinskaja, author of Shakespeare’s Verse: Iambic Pentameter and the Poet’s Idiosyncrasies, Ward Elliot (a Professor of Government) and Robert Valenza (a mathematician and statistician), along with MacDonald Jackson and David Lake. These latter scholars were part of the Shakespeare Authorship Clinic who studied the Funeral Elegy and weredetailed in Vickers’ aforementioned book.

When any of these scholars come out in favor, then we’ll have something. As it is, the game is only just afoot.

One thing to know: With the exception of the scholars I’ve provided above, Shakespeare Scholars aren’t necessarily good at recognizing Shakespeare! It takes a certain kind of talent and knowledge to recognize Shakespeare – some of it having nothing to do with a degree in literature. It’s 9 parts science and 1 part intuition. Here’s a beautiful example – Oxford by the Numbers (which includes a rejection of Double Falsehood). That’s why you will find a mathematician and statistician among the scholars who can sort out genuine Shakespeare from the Fletchers or the Theobalds.

Just last night, I found an online copy of Double Falsehood and reread it. I’ll format it and reprint it here for those who are curious (within the week). And having read it, I see lots of imitation, but no Shakespeare. I may go into more detail with another post (because I really, really enjoy this kind of murder mystery) but for now, I’ll be brief. First, just because a play had Shakespeare’s name attached to it (as with Cardenio – from which Double Falsehood is supposedly drawn) doesn’t mean Shakespeare actually had anything to do with it (let alone Fletcher). For example:

The First Part of Sir John Oldcastle, 1600, appeared in two editions bearing the words ‘Written by William Shakespeare.’

The Troublesome Reign of King John. The title-page of the edition of 1611 says: “Written by W. Sh.”

The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of Yorke. These plays were reprinted in 1619. The title page claimed they were “written by William Shakespeare, Gent.”

The Merry Devil of Edmonton Printed as being by Shakespeare in 1653

The History of Cardenio ‘A Play by Mr. Fletcher and Shakespeare;’ entered Sept. 9. 1653. It has been suggested that this play is identical with Double Falsehood.

The Second Maiden’s Tragedy was attributed to Shakespeare by Warburton in the 19th Century (I think). Interestingly, The Second Maiden’s Tragedy was recently argued, by Charles Hamilton, to be the actual lost Cardenio. Hamilton’s assertion that the play was a collaboration between Shakespeare and Fletcher has been discounted, but the play may well have been the lost Cardenio and is now generally thought to be a collaboration between Thomas Middleton and John Fletcher (or Middleton’s in its entirety).

This list, by the way, (which is only partial) along with some of the description, comes from The Shakespeare Apocrypha (lestIbe accused of plagiarism!). The commentary on The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, properly called The Lady’s Tragedy, is my own. And notice that Cardenio (three manuscripts of which were reputedly in Theobald’s possession) wasn’t identified as Shakespeare’s until almost 4 decades after his death. Given the sheer number of plays whose authors were inadvertently (and deliberately) misidentified during these decades, there’s no reason to believe Cardenio was an exception. (And it wouldn’t be the first time Middleton’s verse was identified as Shakespeare’s or Fletcher’s.)

Shakespeare's Imagination by Edward A. Armstrong

Though Lewis Theobald claimed to have based Double Falsehood on manuscripts, within a week of having produced Double Falsehood, his play was called a hoax and poets like Pope challenged him to produce the manuscripts. Theobald never did. The obvious inference is that Theobald, who was known to have imitated Shakespeare, either never had the manuscripts or knew that the manuscripts would undercut his claim. What man would let his career go down in flames, would let his reputation be destroyed, if all he had to do was produce manuscripts reputedly in his possession? That hasn’t stopped scholars from rationalizing his behavior.

If Theobald did have manuscripts, but didn’t produce them, then it’s probably because he recognized that Fletcher’s collaborator (if we accept that the original was a collaboration and that Fletcher had a hand in the play) was not Shakespeare. Was it better to conceal the manuscripts (thus giving him plausible deniability – no proof of anything) or to reveal that he had forged Shakespeare? He probably decided the former was the lesser of two evils. It’s obvious to anyone that Theobald meddled with the text (imitating Shakespeare), and claiming that he did so to suit contemporary tastes is the charitable interpretation. It’s more likely, given his behavior, that the original manuscripts weren’t Shakespearean enough, that Theobald knew it, and altered the texts accordingly.

Who was the other collaborator (or author of the entire play) if not Shakespeare? Assuming the manuscripts were real, I put my money on Middleton (Thomas Dekker, see my latest post). There are mannerisms in Double Falshood that could be construed as Fletcher’s (Acts III-V), mannerisms that Theobald probably wouldn’t have recognized (but they’re also similar to Middleton’s); and those mannerisms, interestingly, remain (an argument that Theobald really did have manuscripts). For instance, both Middleton and Fletcher used feminine endings (and heavy feminine endings) to a degree that Shakespeare did not. A small example comes from the start of Act III, Scene i.

Jul. Poor Leonora! Treacherous, damn’d |Henriquez!
She bids me fill my Memory with her Danger;
I do, my Leonora; yes, I fill
The Region of my Thought with nothing else;
Lower, she tells me here, that this Affair
Shall yield a Testimony of her Love:
And prays, her Letter may come safe and sudden.
This Pray’r the Heav’ns have heard, and I beseech ’em,
To hear all Pray’rs she makes.

The formulation ’em for them (and as a feminine ending) is one that you will frequently find in Fletcher’s verse (and Middleton’s, though less so). Curiously, the passages which one might ascribe to Fletcher (if the play was a collaboration and if one grants that Theobald was working from manuscripts) remain relatively unmolested by Theobald. Either that or Theobald was better at forging Fletcher (or Middleton) than Shakespeare (though it’s unlikely that he would have been capable of such fine grained forgery). Also, the congenial metrical flow more nearly matches a Fletcher or Middleton than anything Shakespeare would have written so late in his career (the period when he was collaborating with Fletcher).

The part of the play, however, that is thought to be originally by Shakespeare, strikes me as having Middleton’s genetics with a heavy dose of pseudo-Shakespearean meddling (in Italics) by Theobald – from Act I Scene ii:

Jul. I do not see that Fervour in the Maid,
Which Youth and Love should kindle. She consents,
As ’twere to feed without an Appetite;
Tells me, She is content; and plays the Coy one,
Like Those that subtlymake their Words their Ward,
Keeping Address at Distance. This Affection
Is such a feign’d One, as will break untouch’d;Dye frosty, e’er it can be thaw’d; while mine,
Like to a Clime beneath Hyperion’s Eye,Burns with one constant Heat. I’ll strait go to her;
Pray her to regard my Honour: but She greets me.–

Enter Leonora, and Maid.

See, how her Beauty doth inrich the Place!
O, add the Musick of thy charming Tongue,Sweet as the Lark that wakens up the Morn,
And make me think it Paradise indeed.
I was about to seek thee, Leonora,
And chide thy Coldness, Love.

First of all, notice the repetition of Coy oneand feigned One– as if the poet were short of imaginative faculties (hung up on one aspect of Shakespeare’s style). In fact, similar “Shakespearean” formulations will show up again and again [Act 1 Scene iii]:

Th’ Obscureness of her Birth
Cannot eclipse the Lustre of her Eyes,
Which make her all One Light

The phrase Charming Tongue is not one that Shakespeare would have used so late in his career. This formulation only appears once in his entire output (in Titus Andronicus), “charming eyes”, and might well have been Robert Greene’s George Peele’s rather than Shakespeare’s. However, the

Shakespeare's Verse by Marlina Tarlinskaja

phrase is all too typical of the kind of fluff that was being produced by poets in Theobald’s day. The phrase “wakens up the Morn” gives away Theobald’s hand. Why? The phrase never appears in Shakespeare because the formulation wake up is anachronistic. In short, the reputedly Shakespearean passages smack of 18th Century revisionism – what an 18th century poetaster would have thought that Shakespeare sounded like. The claim that some words are unique to Shakespeare is bogus. After all, what else(!) would one expect form an 18th century forger trying to imitate Shakespeare?

The real test is in the meter. That’s something Theobald did not have the wit to imitate. Granted, if Theobald was working from manuscripts, he’s altered the meter, but even so, it smacks of Middleton. Shakespeare’s late metrical and syntactic style is very different from Theobald’s passages (I’ll save that comparison for a later post). Bare in mind, too, that Middleton was himself a natural forger of Shakespeare! Middleton, when he made the effort, could write top-notch poetry in the Shakespearean vein. Middleton, who worked and collaborated with Shakespeare, was heavily influenced by and admired the elder poet – another reason for Shakespearean echoes. [Note: March 25, 2010: While my opinions concerning Middleton remain unchanged, I find that the evidence argues for his authorship of Acts III-V, and Thomas Dekker’s authorship of Acts I & 2]

Here is a passage of Middleton (The Widdow: Act 3 Scene 2):

Ansaldo

I ha’ got myself unbound yet. Merciless villains!
I never felt such hardness since life dwelt in me.
‘Tis for my sins. That light in yonder window —
That was my only comfort in the woods,
Which oft the trembling of a leaf would lose me–
Has brought me thus far; yet I cannot hope
For succour in this plight: the world’s so pitiless,
And everyone will fear or doubt me now.
To knock will be too bold; I’ll to the gate
And listen if I can hear any stirring.

Enter Francisco [aloof]

Was ever man so crossed? — No, ’tis but sweat, sure,
Or the dew dropping from the leaves above me;
I thought ‘t’ad bled again. These wenching businesses
Are strange unlucky things and fatal fooleries;
No mar’l so many gallants die ere thirty.
‘Tis able to vex out a man’s heart in five year,
The crosses that belong to’t: first, arrested –
That set me back two mangy hours at least;
Yet that’s a thing my heat could have forgiv’n,
Because arresting, in what kind soever,
Is a most gentleman-like affliction.
But here, within a mile o’th’town, forsooth,
And two mile off this place, where a man’s oath
Might ha’ been taken for his own security,
And his thoughts brisk and set upon the business,
To light upon a roguy flight of thieves —
Pox on ’em! Here’s the length of one of their whittles.
But one of my dear rascals I pursued so
The jail has him, and he shall bring out’s fellows.
Had ever young man’s love such crooked fortune?

Did you notice Middleton’s echo of Romeo and Juliet – “That light in yonder window“? Compare “Dye frosty“, in Double Falsehood, with Middleton’s “roguy flight”. The trick of coining adjectives (and adverbs) by attaching the -y ending wasn’t a neologistic device that Shakespeare favored. That device grew in favor shortly after his death (adopted by the likes of Middleton). It later ruined scads and scads of 18th century poems and finally died a climactic and ugly death during the start of the 19th century. One should fully expect to see such language if Theobald were to revise Middleton (or Fletcher).

What must I do? — But That’s not worth my Thought:
I will commend to Hazard all the Time
That I shall spend hereafter: Farewel, my Father,Whom I’ll no more offend: and Men, adieu,Whom I’ll no more believe: and Maids, adieu,Whom I’ll no longer shame. The Way I go,
As yet I know not. — Sorrow be my Guide.

Now compare this habit of thought to the following [The Life of Tymon of Athens: Scene 2]:

We make ourselves fools to disport ourselves,
Upon whose age we void it up again
With poisonous spite and envy.Who lives that’s not depraved or depraves?Who dies that bears not one spurn to their graves
Of their friend’s gift?
I should fear those that dance before me now
Would one day stamp upon me. ‘T’as been done.
Men shut their doors against a setting sun.

Timon is by Shakespeare, says you? No, it was a collaboration between Middleton and Shakespeare. The passage above is generally agreed to be by Middleton and can be found in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works.

But, it’s just one comparison and if the case is going to be made for Middleton, it has to be one among many.

Anyway, these few examples don’t add up to an argument, but they give you an idea of the way Double Falsehood might be examined. If, in the long run, the conjecture is that the play was written by Fletcher and Middleton (a first for these two playwrights who were not known to have collaborated), you heard it here first (by gad). That said, it’s also possible that the entirety of the play was written by Fletcher alone, by Middleton alone [Edit: or, as the evidence now suggests, by Dekker and Middleton]. Other plays identified as being by Beaumont & Fletcher, for example, have since been attributed to Middleton. Along with Shakespeare, Fletcher might have had nothing to do with the play. [Edit: Also interesting to note, Dekker’s work has been misidentified as Shakespeare’s in other plays.]

In the meantime, I look forward to hearing from Brian Vickers.

Addendum: After posting this, I googled Dr. Dodypoll. Only to discover that my poetry was published eight years ago! (I wrote a note to the webmaster. I hope he keeps my forgery with an updated explanation, but if not, below is how it appeared – and may still.)

And to think, all this time I’ve been telling people that I’ve never been published. Turns out… I was published in 1600!

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We in the United States, as in any other country, aren't always represented by who governs us. So long as you afford to others the dignity and respect for life and liberty you would afford yourself, it doesn't matter to me where you're from, what language you speak or what truth you believe in. You're welcome here.

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Patrick Gillespie has self-published one book of Poetry and edited nothing besides. His poetry and criticism has been firmly ignored and hasn't been translated into a single language. Gillespie has never been a Poet Laureate (let alone a Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere), a Literary Fellow of the National Endowment of the Arts, or a Fellow of the Vermont Arts Council. He has received no prizes from the Poetry Foundation (or any other poetry related organizations) and the devil reportedly worries that Hell will freeze over if he ever receives anything like a Genius Grant from the MacArthur Fellows Program. He has been firmly rejected by any and all publishers. No plaques have been or will be dedicated to him or his poetry. Gillespie has received no recognition or prizes of any kind. He holds zero academic credentials or titles. In short, Gillespie is just like you -- of little to no importance to all but a few. You have no reason whatsoever to read him. He wears bottle-cap glasses, works as a Carpenter, has three daughters and a good sense of humor. He is currently replacing all the bad windows in his Vermont home.